History of Iowa From the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the Twentieth Century/3/Counties/Mills
MILLS COUNTY was created in 1851 and named for Major Frederick Mills, a gallant young Iowa officer who was killed at the Battle of Cherubusco in the Mexican War. Its western boundary is the Missouri River and it lies in the second tier north of the Missouri State line. The county is twenty-four miles in length from east to west and eighteen miles in width, containing four hundred forty-four square miles. The western portion of the county consists of level bottom land of the Missouri River valley, in places reaching a width of from three to seven miles, east of which rise the high bluffs which in remote ages formed the shore of the river.
The first white settler was Colonel Peter A. Sarpy who as early as 1836 established a trading house and was an agent of the American Fur Company. He laid out a town near the mouth of Mosquito Creek and named it St. Mary. For many years it was a thriving village but the Missouri River encroached upon it gradually undermining the buildings until most of them disappeared beneath the floods and the town was abandoned. Henry Alice, who came as a missionary to the Pawnee Indians in 1834, made his home near St. Mary. In 1846 thirty Mormons, who were among those driven out of Nauvoo, stopped in Mills County on the east side of Key Creek near the Missouri and built cabins to shelter them through the approaching winter. They formed a village to which they gave the name of Rushville. Among them was William Brittain who became a permanent resident of the county. In 1847-8 Silas Hillman, Libeons Coon, Ira Hillman, G. N. Clark, J. Everett and others settled near the present site of Glenwood. In 1849 Mr. Coon laid out a town on his farm which he named Coonville.
In 1851 the county government was organized by the election of the following officers: William Smith, judge; W. W. Noyes, clerk and James Hardy, sheriff. The county-seat was located at Coonville where the first term of court was held in 1851, at which Judge James Sloan, a Mormon, presided. In 1849 the first flouring-mill in the county was built by J. W. Collidge. Here D. H. Coloman, a young lawyer taught the first school in a log cabin ten feet by twelve in size. Mr. Soloman became a prominent lawyer and was one of the framers of the Constitution of the State in 1857.
In 1853 the name of the county-seat was changed from Coonville to Glenwood. Soon after the close of the War of the Rebellion one of the Soldiers' Orphans' Homes was located at Glenwood and later the Institution for the Feeble Minded was built there. The first newspaper in the county was the Glenwood Times, established in May, 1856, by J. M. Dews. The largest apple orchard in the State was planted in Mills County by John Y. Stone. The soil of this region seems to be peculiarly adapted to fruit growing. Malvern is a thriving town near the center of the county. The Burlington Railroad was the first built in the county.